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Abstract

Noting
that quality in early childhood education is related to the quality of communication
and interaction among teachers and children, this article explores how teachers
can facilitate children's telling others about their perspectives of the world.
The paper asks the questions: "How do we as researchers and teachers interpret
the child and his or her learning? How do we participate in the process of making
the child's view visible?" Using transcriptions of conversations, videotape
of interactions, and photographs, the article illustrates how children communicate
and interact with each other and adults. The article concludes that teachers can
facilitate children's expression of their opinions or perspectives by becoming
competent in listening and directing children's attention toward important values,
skills, and knowledge.

Introduction

A
view generally held within the field of early childhood education today is that
the child's perspective should be taken into consideration in research as well
as in practice. But how is this idea implemented in research and in practice?
Is it enough to listen to the child's voice, or are there other challenges for
adults working with children?

Bronfenbrenner
(1979) claimed, some 25 years ago, that a child's perspective is always subject
to an adult's interpretation: this interpretation is how adults make sense of
what children tell them. The central questions then become: "How do we as
researchers and teachers interpret the child and his or her learning? How do we
participate in the process of making the child's view visible?"

This
paper focuses not only on these questions, but also on how such questions could
be related to recent trends in education, curricula, and theories of learning.
Enabling children to tell their own versions of what the meaning of life is to
them, and to talk about different experiences in early childhood education, is
both a demanding and challenging task for the teacher and the researcher.

Listening
to the Child's Own Voice

For
a time, the photograph below was standing on my kitchen table. It is a photo of
two macaw parrots, and one of these parrots is now living in a huge cage in my
kitchen. One of my granddaughters, who was 5 years old, saw the photo, and the
following conversation took place:

Hjördis:
"This is a boy and a girl, isn't it?" [points at the parrots] Ingrid:
"Yes!" Hjördis: "And which one do you want to buy?"
Ingrid: "The boy." Hjördis: "I thought so."

(For
a few seconds, I had a conversation in my mind about gender questions and what
kind of message I gave to her by choosing the male.)

Ingrid:
I took a deep breath and asked, "Why did you think I would choose the boy?"
Hjördis: "Well, because if you have a girl parrot, other birds will
come flittering, and you will get baby parrots, and I do not think you want a
whole bunch of them!"

Figure 1. Ingrid and the two parrots.

What
I can say is that I did not really listen to her at the beginning because I was
so occupied with my own attitudes toward gender questions. Let us, on the other
hand, look at a situation where the adult is totally occupied with listening to
a child. The situation is taken from reports by Cleve (2002) of therapy sessions
with Victor (2.6 years old). Victor had lost his mother and little brother in
a car accident a few months earlier. He became the "clown" at the preschool,
trying to make everybody else happy. The preschool staff told the father that
this behavior was not normal considering the circumstances, and they suggested
that the father take Victor to a psychotherapist. In Cleve's book titled A
Big and a Small One Have Disappeared (2002, pp. I-XVI), one can follow Victor
through 15 hours of therapy. During the first hour, Victor puts a lot of toy horses
upside down. By not letting them walk on their legs, he shows how life appears
to him. His whole existence has suddenly turned upside down.

During
the fifth hour, he plays with a goblin, a fire engine, and a funeral car. The
goblin, who cannot walk, lies on top of the fire engine. Both the fire engine
and the funeral car want to fetch him. Which one to choose? Is it possible to
be alive and be dead at the same time? Yes, in a 2-year-old child's fantasy it
is.

During the 11th hour,
Victor tries to bury a large and a small ball. He finds it difficult to decide
whether they should be covered by a lot of sand or just a little. Is it possible
to remember those who are buried? If you can see them? If you cannot see them?

During
the 15th hour, Victor shows that the car is more damaged on the side where the
mother and the little child sat. It is not damaged on the side where the father
sat at the steering wheel. After using play to act out the accident, Victor describes
reality in his own words.

When
they are about to finish the last hour, Victor plays with two camel figures who
each pulls a carriage with a doll. They stop and wave goodbye to each other.

After
the therapy has been completed, Victor's life continues in a more balanced way
for him.

It is amazing
how much a child can tell when someone really listens! But it is also obvious
how this young child needed props to express his perspective. On the other hand,
how the child's perspective comes through is always a question of the adult's
attempt to understand and make sense of the thoughts and experiences of the child's
life (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In other words, although we are talking about Hjördis's
perspective in the first example and Victor's perspective in the second, it is
the adults who have created possibilities for each child to express himself or
herself, and it is the adults who also interpret the child's perspective.

With
respect to the child's perspective, one needs to bear in mind that children's
expression of meaning is always taking place in a certain situation, a specific
context, based on the child's earlier experiences and capacity to express himself
or herself. But it is also dependent on the adults' ways of making sense, which
are related to knowledge of child development as well as to knowledge about the
particular child in focus, together with the adults' willingness to see the meaning
the child is creating.

If
we go back to Hjördis and the parrots, we see that it was an everyday situation
in which I was too occupied with my own thinking about gender questions to understand
Hjördis's realityher waiting for a baby brother in a few months' time.
For Victor, it was a traumatic experience that had totally changed his everyday
life and the lives of all the people close to him. The therapist, however, devotes
all her energy and attention to Victor's expressions, made both bodily and verbally.
She is willing to make sense of Victor's actions and reactions and has the necessary
skills to do so.

Theory
and Practice

Working
with children in practice or in theory always ends up with the adult's way of
interpreting children's behavior. What are the similarities in the ways teachers
and researchers interpret children's behavior? Teachers as well as researchers
need to arrange or happen upon situations in which children act and express themselves
(bodily and verbally). A prerequisite for this opportunity is for children to
be involved in something that interests and engages them. Both researchers and
practitioners must interact with children in one way or another. There are, of
course, differences between teachers and researchers in the ways that they interpret
and use children's expressions. The most apparent difference is the time and effort
put into analyzing children's expressions. The teacher has to do this analysis
on the spot, while the researcher can spend weeks analyzing in his or her office.
The goals are obviously also different. The researcher can interpret and describe
her findings, while the teacher has to interpret and immediately focus the child's
attention toward something that she wants the child to learnthat is, for
the teacher, there is always a normative aspect to her response in such situations.

Searching
Databases on Children's Perspective

As
a basis for an article called "Participation as Assessment and Pedagogy"
in a special issue of a journal (Pramling Samuelsson & Sheridan, 2003) on
the topic "The Child's Perspective versus the Child Perspective," my
coauthor and I searched all the major databases on the child's perspective and
related notions (e.g., children's voices, participation, view). To our surprise,
we found much less than we had expected. The reason for this result, of course,
could have been that we used wrong terms or concepts for our search or that we
made some other mistakes. But what we found fell into two categories: articles
that were concerned with preschool children and articles that dealt with school-age
children. Under the "child perspective" category were articles about
early years education that were related to pedagogy and, specifically, to "child
centeredness." Under the "child's perspective" category were articles
about older children in school that were related to their participation in different
ways. It seems as though researchers think that children must be "close to
becoming adults" in order to be allowed to be heard and to express their
perspectives.

What do
we mean when we talk about the child's perspective? Is it a question of participation
as a value, or is it the essence of pedagogy? No matter how we interpret it, a
central question becomes: "When and in what way can a child's perspective
become visible?"

Children
Always Express a "Story"

Let
us look at the photo below and try to interpret this little boy in his context.
Without knowing anything about the boy or the context, we can see that he is an
active infant, around a year old, fully occupied with exploring objects in his
surrounding world. But we also notice that something is happening in his surroundings
that makes him change his attention from the objects in his hands to what is happeningand
because he is smiling, we can also draw the conclusion that what is happening
around him is related to a human being.

Figure 2. Hjalmar, 11 months old.

So,
from a single photo, we can say a lot about this child and his perspectives. He
is busy exploring the world of objects, but when some individual interacts, that
social relation becomes more important or meaningful to the child than the objects
he was exploring. Katherine Nelson (1996) suggests that children, bodily or verbally,
tell stories to each other or to adults in order to share a culture and develop
a self. Language and narratives are constructions in groups that make individual
memories into shared conceptual systems. Human interaction and communication become
superior to playing with objects, although young children spend a lot of time
exploring objects.

Toddlers
express themselves and communicate with their whole body, and their actions are
as trustworthy as spoken language (Løkken, 2000). Løkken also claims
that language can expand a child's experience but is never the experience as a
whole. But whether children can express themselves verbally or bodily, they always
seek meaningand it is in the process of seeking meaning that the child's
perspective becomes visible.

Let
us look at a video observation by Pramling Samuelsson
and Lindahl (1999, pp. 93-95), described below:

Yuta,
the boy in the video, 13 months old, and Minori, the girl, 19 months old, are
sitting next to each other on the floor in the middle of the room. In the background,
the teacher is arranging something. Minori wears a colorful necklace around her
neck, and she snatches another one that Yuta holds in his hand. Minori puts this
one also around her neck. Yuta nods his head toward Minori. He bows again, lifts
his right arm, and points. Minori looks at him, lifts her left arm, and points
in the same direction. Both children are holding up their arms, pointing in the
same direction. Yuta discovers the camera and watches while Minori is arranging
her necklaces. Then Minori takes off her necklaces, letting them fall down behind
her back. She takes one necklace in each hand, puts one in front of her and the
other one around her neck. She picks up the first one and puts it around her neck
as well. The teacher brings two more necklaces, shows them to Yuta, and puts them
on the floor next to him. Yuta shows no interest in these two necklaces but grabs
the necklace Minori is wearing around her neck and takes it off.

The
teacher picks up another necklace, trying to create some distraction. Minori takes
that necklace and now has one necklace in each hand. In his left hand, Yuta holds
the necklace he took from Minori. He holds it in front of her, bowing. Minori
answers by nodding her head. Yuta reaches forward, trying to take one of Minori's
necklaces, but she snatches it away with a discouraging expression on her face.
Yuta starts bowing intensely toward her, and Minori answers by bowing back in
the same way. The children bow and nod their heads toward each other, and Yuta
holds up a necklace and hands it over to Minori, bowing even faster. Minori answers
by bowing back in the same way.

The
teacher, who has been watching the children, is bowing in the background. Minori
tries to throw a necklace around her own neck, but it falls off. She puts on another
one. Yuta holds up another necklace, bowing. Minori puts on another necklace,
looking up to the ceiling. Yuta throws away the necklace that he was holding in
is hand and grabs the two that Minori is wearing around her neck. He bows and
throws them away. Minori reaches out for them and takes them. Yuta bows toward
her, and she bows back. They smile at each other. Yuta continues to bow, and then
Minori offers him one of her necklaces. He accepts it, says "aaha,"
and points upwards, dropping the necklace. Minori follows his eyes and points
too. Then Minori puts the necklace on again, looking around. Yuta takes up some
of the necklaces from the floor and bows toward Minori. She puts on one necklace,
while Yuta keeps bowing earnestly toward her. Then Yuta tries to do as Minori
does, that is, he tries to put on necklaces. But when he tries, the necklace ends
up next to his ear or on top of his head and falls off. Once again, he takes a
necklace in his hand and tries to get it around his neck, without success. The
necklace just slides off. Yuta tries over and over again, but he does not succeed.
Minori is arranging her necklaces, and Yuta bows toward her. When Minori has managed
to put on several necklaces, Yuta pulls all of them off. Obviously annoyed, Minori
takes them back. Then Yuta hits her on her hand, takes the necklaces that Minori
has in front of her, and puts them in his mouth.

A
teacher interrupts the interplay.

Communication
and Interaction

This
observation of the toddlers could be interpreted in many ways, but just by pointing
out a few issues, one can claim that these children are really trying to master
a social situation through bodily expressions and interactions. They are also
focusing on the necklaces, and the one child is discriminating and discovering
differences between the two necklaces. He wants the one used by the other child,
so he initiates the nodding and pointing to the other child. There is really a
"tuning in" and nonverbal communication going on, which partly is very
friendly and partly a little bit aggressive. The social interaction in terms of
imitation and variation goes through the whole video sequence described by Lindahl
and Pramling Samuelsson (2002). Both children also struggle to make sense of their
communication and actions and thereby express themselves.

Toddlers
and preschoolers often take the world for granted, and they do not always need
words to communicate. Communicating with adults, however, is differentsomething
Piaget told us many years ago (Piaget, 1973). Children are more equal to each
other than to adults, which of course fosters different patterns of communication.
Liv Germs (n.d.) shows in her research how children under the age of 4, in their
spontaneous initiated communication with teachers, give background information,
deepen comments, use mental words (e.g., wish, thought, knew), and talk about
others' thoughts. The individual child's ways of opening up a communication is
obvious, howeversome children are skilled in expressing themselves if they
have something to communicate and the adult is listening.

Children's
ways of communicating with peers also differ from their communication with adults.
According to Dion Sommer (2003), a child's communication is dependent on his or
her relation to her own self and others. The study that he has carried out is
based on observations of 120 children from all the Nordic countries. Children
labeled as being socially competent are children who both are able to express
their own feelings and meaning and are able to listen to and interpret peers'
expressions. Three-fourths of these children are girls. Children in another group
are also labeled as having "conformity patterns." These children are
not able to express their own feelings and thoughts but can only listen to others.
A majority of these children are girls.

The
third group is labeled the self-articulate pattern group. These children can express
themselves, but they are not able to listen to others. These are the children
who we usually describe as extroverted or outgoing. Three-fourths of these children
are boys. Finally, we have the social isolation patterns groupchildren who
do not listen to others and who do not express themselves. They are only 7% of
the children studied, but all of them are boys. These children are excluded by
peers. Sommer claims that only 50% of the 5-year-old children in his study are
socially competent in the way described here as being both able to express themselves
and able to listen to others. Given these findings, a question comes to my mind:
Why do we succeed with only 50% of the children given that preschool teachers
by tradition claim that the preschool's most important contribution to a young
child's life is the social aspect, which is developed there in interaction with
peers? (Katz & McClellan, 1997; Pramling Samuelsson & Sheridan, n.d.).

The
question of the teacher's role in giving children opportunities to both express
themselves and listen to others then becomes a key question in early childhood
education: Are we really fostering social competence, or is it just rhetoric,
given that we know that social competence is important (Katz, 2003)? Questions
all teachers can ask themselves is whether or not they really reflect about what
it means to arrange opportunities for communication, both among peers and between
children and adults, and what other factors are dealt with in social competence.

Experiences
Influencing the Child's Understanding of the Surrounding World

Let
us look at Calle's (age 5.6) story and think about his experiences of mathematics:

"I can make 3 into 24."
"What do you mean?" asks the teacher. Calle tells her that if you have
3 pieces that you divide, you will get 6. If you divide these 6 pieces, you will
get 12 because 6+6 is 12. And then, if you divide 12, you'll get 24. "But
how did you know about this?" asks the teacher. "I have done it,"
answers Calle. "12 and 12 makes 24."

How
is it possible for a child at the age of 5.6 years to engage in this thinking
operation without any concrete objects? Calle happened to be participating in
a preschool where his teacher employed certain principles related to basic mathematics
in her classroom, such as:

Focus
children's attention toward aspects of the world that they want to develop their
experiences of (in this case, basic notions within mathematics).

Encourage
children to imagine, think, and reflect about content related to the objectives
of learning.

Get
children to express themselves and thereby make their own ways of thinking visible.

Encourage diverse ways
of thinking, expressed through drawing, creating objects, or verbally, and then
use these expressions as content.

Here
the teacher has worked with a clear idea of what basic mathematics means, but
also with a specific approach to the act of learning, that is, how she thinks
learning comes about (Pramling, 1990). By working systematically to direct children's
attention toward certain objectives and using children's own ideas and reflections,
teachers have helped young children develop astounding skills. (For an extended
description of the teacher's way of working with mathematics and the children's
learning, see Doverborg and Pramling Samuelsson, 1999, 2000, 2001.)

Another
child, 7-year-old Mandis, talks about when she started compulsory school and was
asked to tell someone what it was like to be in school: "It's fun at first,
then it gets boring, and then you get used to it.."

What
are Mandis's experiences? First of all, she has experiences from two school systems,
preschool and primary school, and she is able to compare and value them in relation
to each other (Pramling, Klerfelt, & Willams Graneld, 1995).

What
a child tells us as adults is a question of our theoretical perspective, our willingness
and skill to discover the child's experiences, the choice of experiences provided
for children's learning, and the opportunities to engage and interest a child
in certain topics. It is here that the crossroad between the individual and the
collective becomes centralthe point of intersection between each child's
experiences and perspectives and the intentions of society stated in curricula
(Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2003; OECD, n.d.).

An
Example from an Age-Integrated Classroom

Monica
Nilsson and Ulla Sundemo (2001, pp. 161-163), in their multicultural classroom
(with children between 7 and 9 years old), mainly focus on working with characters
from children's books as an asset for learning. They began with choosing a few
books such as The Plant Interested Linnéa and The Handy Beaver
Castor. Later on, the children chose the book The Ingenious Mulle Meck.
The characters of these books were made in full scale (see some examples below).

Figure 3. Full-scale models of figures from a children's story.

Figure 4. Full-scale models of figures from a children's story.

When you
see these characters in the classroom, it is easy to understand why they trigger
the children's fantasy and willingness to communicate with the characters as well
as with others.

A trunk
containing new letters from the characters, problems, or new equipment became
part of the teaching strategy. The letters in the trunk made children become members
of the "Reading and Writing Club" (Smith, 1995). They wrote letters
to the characters and they got letters back, often with different problems to
solve. Below we can see how two children are weighing the trunk, trying to find
out what could be in itjust papers or something heavier?

Figure 5. Children weighing a trunk.

On
this day, there were mathematical problems to solve, as we can see in the picture
below.

Figure 6. A mathematical problem for children to solve.

The
problem presented was "It is dark in Billy's room. In the drawer, there are
10 white socks and 10 blue. How many socks does Billy have to pick up in order
to get a pair of the same color?" Children came up with a large variety of
solutions:

"He
has to pick up 3." (boy, age 7) "He needs to take 5 from the white
and 5 from the blue." (girl, age 9) "It's dark in Billy's room,
so Billy must take 3 socks. And try them on." (boy, age 9) "You
can take 2 if you're lucky, or 3, then you will be sure to make a pair."
(girl, age 8) And, finally, Bej's very obvious solution: "Turn on the
light!"

The
teacher exposes children's different ideas as content in the teaching processshe
uses a metacognitive approach, trying to get children to become aware of their
different ways of thinking (Watkins, 2001).

This
short description of a classroom is an example of how the teacher has clear intentions
of providing children with opportunities to be engaged and active in sharing their
own experiences and their own perspectives on topics related to the curriculum.
These proceedings do not only focus on making children literate and able to solve
mathematical problems. The work around these characters and literature brings
in several other subject areas from the curriculum, such as nature and social
science, as well as focusing on the children's learning processes. And I can assure
you that in this classroom children are engaged and interested in the topic dealt
with, and because of that interest, they both tell their own stories and listen
to others' stories.

Conclusions

Quality
in early childhood education today is very much related to communication and interaction;
therefore, children's narratives or opportunities to tell their stories become
central to quality. A child's ability to tell stories or express his or her opinions
or perspectives is dependent on whether the child has relationships with other
children and the teacher. But there also has to be openness and opportunities
for the children to make choices. The teacher has to be competent in listening,
supporting, and challenging the child (Siraj-Blatchford, 1999). The classroom
also has to seethe with collective reflecting and sharing of ideas and meaning
making. At the same time, the teacher must be skilled in directing children's
attention toward important values, skills, and knowledge (Pramling Samuelsson
& Sheridan, 1999). A rich experience for each child is also a necessary foundation
for the child to be able to tell others about his or her own perspectives.

Finally,
there has to be serious respect for the child's world. For example, we have to
be aware of how a child's way of expressing herself is only a small fragment
of the total experience or knowledge of the child. Let us look at the drawing
below, made by Hjördis when she was 5 years old.

Figure 7. A mother, by Hjördis.

When
Hjördis made this drawing, she said, "This is a mother!" I asked
her how one can see that it is a mother. "Because she has lipstick and a
skirt." I joked with her and said, "Then you do not have a mother, because
your mother never wears a skirt or uses lipstick!" Hjördis nodded her
head and said that I was crazy. She obviously knows a lot more about mothers.
But if we within early childhood education just evaluate her drawing and her comments
on the drawing from a Piagetian perspective, we could say that she is in the preoperational
stage, understanding the world around her from external features. We always have
to bear in mind that we only get to share fragments of a child's world or experience,
which is important, especially when we evaluate or assess children's learning.

If
we try to take the perspective of the child, the world is not divided between
play and learningthe world is just something you have to make sense of.
If children begin to distinguish between play and learning, it is because we as
adults make that distinction. But everybody who has seen a 2-year-old child experiencing
and exploring a kitchen cupboard knows that he or she continuously is shifting
between play and serious exploration. To perceive a child as a playing, learning
child means to discover the child's production of variation in his or her experiences.
But also the teacher knows how to use variation as central to the learning process.
Communication and interaction then go on at two levels. When children create their
own play themes, they communicate around an object, but they also spontaneously
use metacommunication in their approach. When the teacher is an active partner
in the child's learning process, she creates opportunities to communicate, but
she also helps children to change perspectives to a metacognitive approach. The
production of variation then becomes central to the learning process (see Pramling
Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2003). Finally, the teacher also has to show
children that she trusts them and has confidence in them, in order to discover
their stories.

In
this particular situation, Hjördis and Frida are trusting me as a grandmotherthat
they are allowed to play with the fine china. And I, on the other hand, when discovering
the situation, had to trust them to be careful and to put the china back in the
cupboard when they finished playing.

Acknowledgments

A
version of this paper was presented at the European Early Childhood Education
Research Association (EECERA) conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in September 2003.

Løkken,
G. (2000). Toddler peer culture. The social style of one and two year old body-subjects
in everyday interaction (197). Trondheim: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige
universitet, Pedagogisk institutt.

Watkins,
C. (2001). Learning about learning enhances performance. (National School
Improvement Network Research Matters Series No. 13).London: Institute
of Education, University of London.

Author
Information

Ingrid
Pramling Samuelsson is a professor and coordinator for early childhood education
at the Department of Education, Göteborg University, Sweden. She has a background
as a preschool teacher and got the first chair in early childhood education in
Sweden in 1996. Her research mainly deals with how children create meaning and
make sense of different aspects of the surrounding world, in the context of preschool
(day care and kindergarten). Another research interest is teachers' professional
development. Professor Pramling Samuelsson has been consulted by the Ministry
of Education, the National Agency for Education, and the Department of Social
Welfare and Health concerning questions about children.